Suffering & Solitude | Info Diet #7

Tech, being human, and finding the right balance between the two

NVIDIA’s meteoric rise is unlike anything the business world has ever seen.

The mind boggling hardware, the enabling software, the widening moats, the competitive advantage, the profit, the cash flow, the AI frenzy, the timing…

It’s breaking both mental models and financial models alike, forcing everyone to rethink what’s possible. Alas, the power of exponential progress, now personified and tangible.

Much of the world was caught by surprise.

But if you know NVIDIA CEO, Jensen Huang, and happened to follow his journey, you probably aren’t that surprised.

You’d have seen the decades of patience, positioning, and planning. Decades of being misunderstood.

I mean, does it get more prescient than this video?

Some notable quips:

• “I don’t need to change the world overnight. I’m gonna change the world over the next 50 years.”

• “Having simpler ideas that you can execute on perfectly is sometimes better than grandiose ideas that your company can’t execute on”

• “I don’t need to build a killer product overnight, I just need to build a winning product. And the goal of winning is so you can play again.”

He kept it simple in the early days, compounded wins, and eventually created a secular tail wind for the ages.

In my day job, I had the good fortune of spending 1-1 time with Jensen Huang back in early 2022, just before their ridiculous ascent.

He’s easily the most impressive CEO I’ve ever met; unbelievably humble, poised, thoughtful, and bold (in all the right ways). If there’s one leader I strive to emulate, it’s Huang.

He’s since blasted into the stratosphere. As Jim Fan said, he’s now the tech bros Taylor Swift: part rock star, part business guru, part philosopher for the exponential age.

In which case, consider me a… Huangy? (okay we’ll workshop that one)

But despite it all, his humility and poise remains. He hasn’t let the moment get the best of him.

My favorite Huang’ism to date is the video below. It’s been making the rounds (and ruffling the feathers of the overly sensitive).

If you’ve suffered any missteps or setbacks, if you feel weighted down by any regrets… take the two minutes and watch this clip.

It will help shift your pain & suffering from a liability to an asset; past, present, or future.

A few notable quotes:

• “People with very high expectations have very low resilience. Unfortunately, resilience matters in success. And I don’t know how to teach it to you other than… I hope suffering happens to you.”

• “In my company, I use the word pain & suffering with great glee. I often say ‘Boy this is going to cause a lot of pain & suffering’, and I mean that in a happy way. Because you want to refine the character of your company. You want greatness out of them. And greatness is not intelligence, greatness comes out of character. And character isn’t formed from smart people, its formed by people who have suffered.”

Now, this message isn’t new. It’s a spin on the idea of antifragility, and we’ve all heard some semblance of it before; from parents, teachers, coaches, etc.

But I’ve been wondering… despite its poignancy, why is it so hard to internalize and put into action?

There’s the psychological reasons: humans are wired to minimize regret and maximize pleasure.

There’s also the social reasons: many of us are raised to play it safe and avoid unnecessary risk.

We also know delayed gratification is a thing, and we know that our greatest triumphs are always on the other side of hard work + risk.

Yet, here so many of us remain; stuck, trepidatious, aimless, and unsatisfied.

So how do we burst through the dam? How do we just… begin?

On that note… some more Church of Jensen programming, and a fun paradox for us to contend with.

The Acquired guys (awesome business podcast btw) ask him what company he’d start if he was 30 years old today.

Huang says he simply wouldn’t do it.

It was just too hard, too painful. It was “a million times harder” than he expected it to be, and had he known that… there’s no way he would have even taken the first step.

He says, “At that time, if we realized the pain & suffering, and just how vulnerable you’re going to feel, and the challenges you’re going to endure, the embarrassment and the shame, and the list of all the things that go wrong. I don’t think anybody would start a company. Nobody in their right might would do it. And I think that’s the superpower of the entrepreneur. They don’t know how hard it is. And they only ask themselves… ‘How hard can it be?’ And to this day, I trick my brain into thinking… ‘How hard can it be?’”

Appreciate the honesty, Jensen, but now that the secret is out… if we’re an aspiring entrepreneur or builder, how the heck do we develop this superpower?

I don’t know what Jensen would say. But I have one idea…

I think the answer is solitude.

This is the most upstream, fundamental thing we can do to positively impact everything else.

It’s also one of the few things in our complete control; the ability to be alone with our thoughts, to go deeply inward and not just ask… but to sit with the difficult and troubling questions that being human throws our way. Am I doing the right thing with my life? Do I believe the things I was taught as a child? Am I happy? If this was all for not, would I still do it?

A must read essay on this idea is ‘Solitude and Leadership’ by William Deresiewicz.

It’s one of the best things I’ve ever read. If you haven’t, just trust me — save the link and read it this week/weekend. It’s… stirring.

If you’re short on time, the principal message is this: if you want to do things that matter, and you want other people to follow, learn to be alone with your thoughts. Especially when those hard questions & moments arise.

Some highlights from the article:

“It’s perfectly natural to have doubts, or questions, or even just difficulties. The question is, what do you do with them? Do you suppress them, do you distract yourself from them, do you pretend they don’t exist? Or do you confront them directly, honestly, courageously? If you decide to do so, you will find that the answers to these dilemmas are not to be found on Twitter or Comedy Central or even in The New York Times. They can only be found within—without distractions, without peer pressure, in solitude.”

He then goes on to magnify the dangers of our all too scattered attentions and bias for multi-tasking; the afflictions of a life orbiting around personal dopamine machines: our phones.

In this context, he leans heavily into how to think… (or rather, how not to think).

“Multitasking, in short, is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.

I find for myself that my first thought is never my best thought. My first thought is always someone else’s; it’s always what I’ve already heard about the subject, always the conventional wisdom. It’s only by concentrating, sticking to the question, being patient, letting all the parts of my mind come into play, that I arrive at an original idea.”

The author brings the piece home as it began, with a section from the timeless novel, Heart of Darkness. This is my favorite part of the essay:

“But let me be clear that solitude doesn’t always have to mean introspection. Let’s go back to Heart of Darkness. It’s the solitude of concentration that saves Marlow amidst the madness of the Central Station. When he gets there he finds out that the steamboat he’s supposed to sail upriver has a giant hole in it, and no one is going to help him fix it. “I let him run on,” he says, “this papier-mâché Mephistopheles”—he’s talking not about the manager but his assistant, who’s even worse, since he’s still trying to kiss his way up the hierarchy, and who’s been raving away at him. You can think of him as the Internet, the ever-present social buzz, chattering away at you 24/7:

“I let him run on, this papier-mâché Mephistopheles and it seemed to me that if I tried I could poke my forefinger through him, and would find nothing inside but a little loose dirt. . . .

It was a great comfort to turn from that chap to . . . the battered, twisted, ruined, tin-pot steamboat. . . . I had expended enough hard work on her to make me love her. No influential friend would have served me better. She had given me a chance to come out a bit—to find out what I could do. No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work—no man does—but I like what is in the work,—the chance to find yourself. Your own reality—for yourself, not for others—what no other man can ever know.”

“The chance to find yourself.” Now that phrase, “finding yourself,” has acquired a bad reputation. It suggests an aimless liberal-arts college graduate—an English major, no doubt, someone who went to a place like Amherst or Pomona—who’s too spoiled to get a job and spends his time staring off into space. But here’s Marlow, a mariner, a ship’s captain. A more practical, hardheaded person you could not find. And I should say that Marlow’s creator, Conrad, spent 19 years as a merchant marine, eight of them as a ship’s captain, before he became a writer, so this wasn’t just some artist’s idea of a sailor. Marlow believes in the need to find yourself just as much as anyone does, and the way to do it, he says, is work, solitary work. Concentration. Climbing on that steamboat and spending a few uninterrupted hours hammering it into shape. Or building a house, or cooking a meal, or even writing a college paper, if you really put yourself into it.”

At the end, the essay takes an unforeseen turn, reflecting on friendship as a form of solitude. Sounds counterintuitive, I know, but read on…

“So solitude can mean introspection, it can mean the concentration of focused work, and it can mean sustained reading. All of these help you to know yourself better. But there’s one more thing I’m going to include as a form of solitude, and it will seem counterintuitive: friendship. Of course friendship is the opposite of solitude; it means being with other people. But I’m talking about one kind of friendship in particular, the deep friendship of intimate conversation. Long, uninterrupted talk with one other person. Not Skyping with three people and texting with two others at the same time while you hang out in a friend’s room listening to music and studying. That’s what Emerson meant when he said that “the soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude.”

Introspection means talking to yourself, and one of the best ways of talking to yourself is by talking to another person. One other person you can trust, one other person to whom you can unfold your soul. One other person you feel safe enough with to allow you to acknowledge things—to acknowledge things to yourself—that you otherwise can’t. Doubts you aren’t supposed to have, questions you aren’t supposed to ask. Feelings or opinions that would get you laughed at by the group or reprimanded by the authorities.”

So, whether its in conversation with yourself, or that one person who matters to you most… let’s embrace solitude as our best tool for building the resilience and super powers we need to identify and attack the hard things that matters to us most.

Because again… “how hard can it be?”

The Info Diet #7

And with that… on to edition #7 of ‘The Info Diet’ by Medium Energy: a simple list of content that has grabbed me most (articles, podcasts, videos, or books).

For the new comers… this ‘information diet’ is broken into three buckets:

(1) Technology- news & trends around all things cutting edge tech, with a focus on AI, spatial computing, and blockchain

(2) Being Human- all things that promote well-being and self-improvement, e.g. psychology, leadership, mental health, neuroscience, fitness

(3) Tech + Being Human- examples of all the goodness that arises when we properly merge buckets #1 and #2, aka: the upside from finding the right balance, or healthy tension, between tech and being human

Enjoy!

Technology

Sora + Luma for 3D | Video: We all know about OpenAI’s Sora: GenAI for high-fidelity video. But did you see how these videos can be used to create 3D assets/worlds with Luma? This is where things get wild...

Figure.AI raises $675M and now… this | Video: In partnership with OpenAI, Figure’s robot can: describe its visual experience - plan future actions - reflect on its memory - explain its reasoning verbally… Humanoid robots aren’t coming, they’re here.

AI + Math | Essay: AI’s ability to do math is the biggest hurdle to true AGI (artificial general intelligence). And Google is making huge strides… their DeepMind’s AI system surpassed the state-of-the-art approach for geometry problems, advancing AI reasoning in mathematics

Being Human

Crisis in Higher Ed and Why Universities Still Matter | Podcast: A great podcast from A16Z on why high education is failing us, and what we can/should do about it.

India Eliminates Extreme Poverty | Article: New data and new method suggests India has practically eliminated extreme poverty. A big step towards perhaps becoming the worlds next great superpower, backed by an at-scale-prowess with technology that never ceases to amaze me (as this great video/pod suggests)

Tech + Being Human

Government Debt | Post: I’ve written quite a bit lately about our current debt spiral and how to protect ourselves against it (bitcoin). This tweet from Balaji does a great job summarizing the problem with visuals and concise prose. It also hints at how this all might play out… aka: moving from a ‘physical state’ to a ‘network state’.

Customer support jobs… cooked | Post: Klarna released a blog stating that they are using AI to replace 700 customer service rep workers. Their ChatGPT-powered chatbot handled 2.3M conversations in the last month and average time to resolution dropped by 9 minutes.

This has led to $40M in additional profit in 2024.

Some see this and think humanity is doomed. I see this and think… A company now has more free capital to go do more stuff, invest in more things, and hire people for higher order, more creative work. The most immediate being moving support reps up the ladder to provide ‘Level 2 support’, creating a better customer experience. But this will also enable new classes of work. Prompt engineering is just one obvious example, but I think we’re going to see entirely new lines of business emerge.